WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers, died Friday. He was 88.

The New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called Ed and considering himself an “ordinary person with ordinary qualities.”

Hillary died at Auckland Hospital at 9 a.m. Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s office said. No cause of death was immediately given.

Hillary’s life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement – yet he was humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing Norgay.

The accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added luster to the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she knighted Hillary as one of her first acts.

But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He wrote of the pair’s final steps to the top of the world: “Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation – these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” Hillary noted.

“But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn’t believe it.

He said: “I removed my oxygen mask to take some pictures. It wasn’t enough just to get to the top. We had to get back with the evidence. Fifteen minutes later we began the descent.”

Unlike many climbers, Hillary said when he died he had no desire to have his remains left on a mountain. He wanted his ashes scattered on Waitemata Harbor in the northern city of Auckland where he lived his life.

In his 1999 book “View from the Summit,” Hillary finally broke his long public silence about whether it was he or Norgay who was the first man to step atop Everest.

“We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in every direction,” Hillary wrote.

“Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized we had reached the top of the world.”

Without fanfare and without compensation, Hillary spend decades pouring energy and resources from his own fund-raising efforts into Nepal through the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1962.

A strong conservationist, he demanded that international mountaineers clean up thousands of tons of discarded oxygen bottles, food containers and other climbing debris that litter the lower slopes of Everest.